I know but at the start of the HEC, SKY were bringing out the old second string excuse for the EDF Energy Cup's utter onesidedness. Then of course results carried into the HEC.

I said it was a second string from both sides. The main point is that those players will be first teamers with only a few injuries. Bar one or two notable performances they will struggle if they had anything like the injury problems we tend to have in the NH (admittedly this is less likely since they play half as many games down south).

GET ON OUT!! I've just tried out the on-line BBC rugby union game called "England Academy". Pretty darned clever. All keyboard Flash games. There are 6 "skills tests" and then a game mode. Of course, it may be old hat to you Brits, but it was new to me and a great time-killer. Link below:

1slipperyfish (troll) wrote:i have only just started reading this thread, but i think you'll find it's actually called the tri-nations paul

No, they're not talking about the girls' version of Rugby. Incidentally, I understand your favourite manager is currently in Oz having job interviews. Who will pull Wigan's fundament out of the flames next season?

Union makes more use of tactics, with the extra players making more options (although sometimes it just means some can be lazy). League is supposed to be a quicker game, but the 6 phase thing can also kill off building suspense.

nothing but pure lazyness. I was paying a lot for hosting in uk, so switched to Amarican company for 30* the capacity with 4* the features and 5* the ease of use for 1/3 of the cost.

I just haven't updated all the files yet.

Did you see the Wales Aus game, a great start to the tournament from a viewer point of view. Although you could see gareth thomas (I think) a little annoyed they went for touch. A good game, somebody deserved to win it, I know with that kind of game people say "there should be no losers", but equally for all that effort there should be a winner no matter how cruel. Maybe theres room for a sudden death point system after time.

Nope, been installing FC6 under VMWare and then seeing how close I can get it to what I want: with a view to my migration from SUSE.
I still haven't finally decided, but I think it's going to be that or Kubuntu. I had thought about Gentoo, but I'm not sure I have the patience (especially if something goes TU along the way).

Oh dear, how terribly off-topic, what a good thing I'm in the right forum for it.

I've torrented FC6, which i installed in qemu, poked around for 30 seconds and said "same as fc5" left it alone. Got kubuntu and ubuntu via torrent, although likely to just try kubuntu.
I also thought about gentoo again, as mentioned in another thread. But like you, I find it simple to make a mess of it.

I'm really wanting to learn php as .net is proving to be a bit of hype over substance at work. It would be great to run a project in tandom and see how development compares in win+asp.net and lin+php But I keep doing other things, like distro-itis.

It may be that FC6 seems more different to FC5 to me as I have used KDE instead of the default Gnome. Then again, I found Kubuntu6.06 and 6.10 to be very much alike.
I think it might be that 6 monthly releases are not going to look very different, unless there has been some major component upgrade (KDE4 soon?). I don't mind a bit of micro-evolution between the macro-evolutionary changes (which usually break things anyway).

KDE 2-3 was a pretty big jump in some ways, 4 has a lot of hype associated with it, hopefully some of its true.

damn all this upgrading, downgrading, installing, patching,cvs, svn. sometimes I wonder if a mac might not distract me so much, or maybe even a bsd..........who am i trying to kid here

REALLY looking forward to tomorrow's match, on paper England looks the muts (is that one t or two?). Looking for big hits, big tries, big smiles (from supporters, not corry, that would be worrying if he smiled) and don't want that funny thing were England bottle it under pressure. Lewsey's done a lot of alttitude training and should be rampant!

nordle wrote: sometimes I wonder if a mac might not distract me so much,

With OSX 10.5 coming out next early year? Surely you jest. It will have things called multiple work "spaces", which, for years, some of us have been mistakenly calling desktops. Time to upgrade (plus, it might be the last one they make for PPC).

At the moment New Zealand are unquestionably the best side in the world. But they've been that in between World Cups before and then failed at the tournament (although they don't look like doing that this time around!)

In the Northern Hemisphere Ireland look the best at the moment, but inspite of some dreaful results recently only a fool would write off France. England are awful at the moment but Wales look good.

Of the others Australia will always up their game, you'd expect South Africa to do so as well, but Argentina could upset anyone's World Cup. They've beated France four times in a row, beat England and ran New Zealand close.

All in all New Zealand to win, France to do well (possibly win it in with home support), Argentina the dark horses.